A Fire Upon the Deep (33 page)

According to the clock, it took less than half an hour for the Skroderiders to make it back. It seemed a lot longer to Pham Nuwen, even though he tried to keep up a casual front with Ravna. Maybe they were both keeping up a front; he knew she still considered him a fragile case.

But the Riders' cameras showed no more signs of the killer butterflies. Finally the cargo lock cracked open and Blueshell and Greenstalk were back.

"I was sure the wily tusk-legs was just pretending there was strong demand," said Blueshell. He seemed as eager to rehash the story as Pham was.

"Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I still think those butterflies might just be part of an act. It's all too melodramatic."

Blueshell's fronds rattled in a way that Pham recognized as a kind of shiver. "I wager not, Sir Pham. Those were Aprahanti. Just the look of them fills you with dread, does it not? They're rare these days, but a star trader knows the stories. Still ... this is a little much even for Aprahanti. Their Hegemony has been on the wane for several centuries." He rattled something at the ship, and the windows were filled with views of nearby berths in the repair harbor. There was more Rider rattling, this time between Greenstalk and Blueshell. "Those other ships are a uniform type, you know. A High Beyond design like ours, but more, um, ...
militant
."

Greenstalk moved close to a window. "There are twenty of them. Why would so many need drive repairs all at once?"

Militant?
Pham looked at the ships with a critical eye. He knew the major features of Beyonder vessels by now. These appeared to have rather large cargo capacity. Elaborate sensoria too.
Hm.
"Okay, so the Butterflies are hard types. How scared is Saint Rihndell and company?"

The Skroderiders were silent for a long moment. Pham couldn't tell if his question was being given serious consideration or if they had simultaneously lost track of the conversation. He looked at Ravna. "How about the local net? I'd like to get some background."

She was already running comm routines. "They weren't accessible earlier. We couldn't even get the News." That was something Pham could understand, even if it was damned irritating. The "local net" was a RIP-wide ultrawave computer and communication network, perhaps a billion times more complex than anything Pham had known -- but conceptually similar to organizations in the Slow Zone. And Pham Nuwen had seen what vandals could do to such structures; Qeng Ho had dealt with at least one obnoxious civilization by perverting its computer net. Not surprisingly, Saint Rihndell hadn't provided them with links to the RIP net. And as long as they were in harbor, the
OOB
's antenna swarm was necessarily down, so they were also cut off from the Known Net and the newsgroups.

A grin lit Ravna's face. "Hei! Now we've got read access, maybe more.
Greenstalk. Blueshell.
Wake up!"

Rattle. "I wasn't asleep," claimed Blueshell, "just thinking on Sir Pham's question. Saint Rihndell is obviously afraid."

As usual, Greenstalk didn't make excuses. She rolled around her mate to get a better look at Ravna's newly opened comm window. There was an iterated-triangle design with Trisk annotations. It meant nothing to Pham. "That's interesting," said Greenstalk.

"I am chuckling," said Blueshell. "It is more than interesting. Saint Rihndell is a hard-trading type. But look, he is making no charge for this service, not even a percentage of barter. He is afraid, but he still wants to deal with us."

Hmm, so something from their High Beyond samples was enough to make him risk Aprahanti violence.
Just hope it's not something we really need too.
"Okay. Rav, see if --"

"Just a second," the woman replied. "I want to check the News." She started a search program. Her eyes flickered quickly across her console window ... and after a second she choked, and her face paled. "By the Powers,
no!
"

"What is it?"

But Ravna didn't reply, or put the news to a main window. Pham grabbed the rail in front of her console and pulled himself around so he could see what she was reading:

Text of message:

One hundred seconds ago, Alliance Forces began action against the tools of the Blight. By the time you read this, the Homo Sapiens worlds known as Sjandra Kei will have been destroyed.

Note well: for all the talk and theories that have flown about the Blight, this is the first time anyone has successfully
acted
. Sjandra Kei was one of only three systems outside of Straumli Realm known to harbor humans in any numbers. In one stroke we have destroyed a third of the Perversion's potential for expansion.

Updates will follow.

There was one other message in the window, an update of sorts, but not from Death to Vermin:

Date: 5.33 hours since disaster at Sjandra Kei

Text of message:

Earlier today, relativistic projectiles struck our main habitations. Fatalities cannot be less than twenty-five billion. Three billion may still live, in transit and in smaller habitats.

We are still under attack.

Enemy craft are in the inner system. We see glow bombs. They are killing everyone.

"Nei nei
nei!
" Ravna drove up against him, her arms tight around him, her face buried in his shoulder. She sobbed incoherent Samnorsk. Her whole body shuddered against him. He felt tears coming to his own eyes. So strange. She had been the strong one, and he the fragile crazy. Now it was turned all around, and what could he do? "Father, mother, sister -- gone, gone."

It was the disaster they thought could not happen, and now it had. In one minute she had lost everything she grew up with, and was suddenly alone in the universe.
For me, that happened long ago
, the thought came strangely dispassionate. He hooked a foot into the deck and gently rocked Ravna back and forth, trying to comfort her.

The sounds of grief gradually quieted, though he could still feel her sobs through his chest. She didn't raise her face from the tear-soaked place on his shirt. Pham looked over her head at Blueshell and Greenstalk. Their fronds looked strange ... almost wilted.

"Look, I want to take Ravna away for a bit. Learn what you can, and I'll be back."

"Yes, Sir Pham." And they seemed to droop even more.

It was an hour before Pham returned to the command deck. When he did, he found the Riders deep in rattling conference with
OOB
. All the windows were filled with flickering strangeness. Here and there Pham recognized a pattern or a printed legend, enough to guess that he was seeing ordinary ship displays, but optimized to Rider senses.

Blueshell noticed him first; he rolled abruptly toward him and his voder voice came out a little squeaky. "Is she all right?"

Pham gave a little nod. "She's sleeping now."
Sedated, and with the ship watching her in case I've misjudged her.
"Look, she'll be okay. She's been hit hard ... but she's the toughest one of us all."

Greenstalk's fronds rattled a smile. "I have often thought that."

Blueshell was motionless for an instant. Then, "Well, to business, to business." He said something to the ship, and the windows reformatted in the compromise usable by both humans and Riders. "We've learned a lot while you were gone. Saint Rihndell indeed has something to fear. The Aprahanti ships are a small fragment of the Death to Vermin extermination fleets. These are stragglers still on their way to Sjandra Kei!"

All dressed up for a massacre, and no place to go.
"So now they want some action of their own."

"Yes. Apparently Sjandra Kei put up some resistance and there were some escapes. The commander of this fleetlet thinks he can intercept some of these -- if he can get prompt repairs."

"What kind of extortion is really possible? Could these twenty ships destroy RIP?"

"No. It's the reputation of the greater force these ships are part of -- and the great killing at Sjandra Kei. So Saint Rihndell is very timid with them, and what they need for repairs is the same class of regrowth agent that we need. We really are in competition with them for Rihndell's business." Blueshell's fronds slapped together, the sort of "go get'em" enthusiasm he displayed when a hot deal was remembered. "But it turns out we have something Saint Rihndell really,
really
wants, something he'll even risk tricking the Aprahanti to get." He paused dramatically.

Pham thought back over the things they had offered the RIPers.
Lord, not the low zone ultrawave gear.
"Okay, I'll bite. What do we have to give'em?"

"A set of flamed trellises! Hah hah."

"Huh?" Pham remembered the name from the list of odds and ends the Skroderiders had scrounged up. "What's a 'flamed trellis'?"

Blueshell poked a frond into his satchel and extended something stubby and black to Pham: an irregular solid, about forty centimeters by fifteen, smooth to the touch. For all its size, it didn't mass more than a couple of grams. An artfully smoothed ... cinder. Pham's curiosity triumphed over greater concerns: "But what's it good for?"

Blueshell dithered. After a moment, Greenstalk said a little shyly, "There are theories. It's pure carbon, a fractal polymer. We know it's very common in Transcendent cargoes. We think it's used as packing material for some kinds of sentient property."

"Or perhaps the excrement of such property," Blueshell buzz-muttered. "Ah, but that's not important. What is, is that occasional races in the Middle Beyond prize them. And why that? Again, we don't know. Saint Rihndell's folk are certainly not the final user. The Tusk-legs are far too sensible to be ordinary trellis customers. So. We have three hundred of these wonderful things ... more than enough to overcome Saint Rihndell's fears of the Aprahanti."

While Pham had been away with Ravna, Saint Rihndell had come up with a plan. Applying the regrowth agent would be too obvious in the same harbor with the Aprahanti ships. Besides, the chief Butterfly had demanded the
OOB
move out. Saint Rihndell had a small harbor about sixteen million klicks around the RIP system. The move was even plausible, for it happened that there was a Skroderider terrane in the Harmonious Repose system -- and currently it was just a few hundred kilometers from Rihndell's second harbor. They would rendezvous with the tusk-legs, exchanging repairs for two hundred seventeen flamed trellises. And if the trellises were perfectly matched, Rihndell promised to throw in an agrav refit. After the Fall of Relay, that would be very welcome....
Hunh.
Ol' Blueshell just never stopped wheeling and dealing.

The
OOB
slipped free of its moorings and carefully drifted up from the ring plane.
Tiptoeing out.
Pham kept a close watch on the EM and ultrawave windows. But there were no target-locking emanations from the Aprahanti vessels, nothing more than casual radar contact. No one followed. Little
OOB
and its "potted plants" were beneath the notice of the great warriors.

One thousand meters above the ring plane. Three. The Skroderiders' chatter -- both with Pham and between themselves -- dwindled to naught. Their stalks and fronds angled so the sensing surfaces looked out in all directions. The sun and its power cloud was a blaze of light on one side of the deck. They were above the rings, but still so close.... It was like standing at sunset on a beach of colored sands ... that stretched to an infinite horizon. The Skroderiders stared into it, their fronds gently swaying.

Twenty kilometers above the rings. One thousand. They lit the
OOB
's main torch and accelerated across the system. The Skroderiders came slowly out of their trance. Once they arrived at the second harbor, the regrowth would take about five hours -- assuming Rihndell's agent had not deteriorated; the Saint claimed it was recently imported from the Top, and undiluted.

"Okay, so when do we deliver the trellises?"

"On completion of the repairs. We can't depart until Saint Rihndell -- or
his
customers -- are satisfied that all the pieces are genuine."

Pham drummed his fingers on the comm console. This operation brought back a lot of memories, some of them hair-raising. "So they get the goods while we're still in the middle of RIP. I don't like it."

"See here, Sir Pham. Your experience with star trading was in the Slow Zone, where exchanges were separated by decades or centuries of travel time. I admire you for that, more than I can say -- but it gives you a twisted view of things. Up here in the Beyond, the notion of return business is important. We know very little of Saint Rihndell's inner motivation, but we do know his repair business has existed for at least forty years. Sharp dealing we can expect from him, but if he robbed or murdered very many, trader groups would know, and his little business would starve."

"Hmf." No point in arguing it right now, but Pham guessed that this situation was special. Rihndell -- and the RIPers in general -- had Death to Vermin sitting on their doorstep, and stories of major chaos coming from the direction of Sjandra Kei. With that background they might just lose their courage once they had the trellises. Some precautions were in order. He drifted off to the ship's machine shop.

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush